Donald Trump Wins a Round at the Supreme Court

Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty31 May 2016

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump won a long legal battle Tuesday after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by former casino workers against Trump Entertainment Resorts.

The workers sued to overturn the company’s bankruptcy ruling in 2014, which canceled union workers’ health insurance and pension payments.

As National Public Radio’s Supreme Court correspondent, Nina Totenburg, reported:

In 2014, Trump Entertainment Resorts, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., was in dire straights financially. When the company filed for bankruptcy protection, it won a ruling from a federal bankruptcy judge stripping the casino workers of their health insurance and payments to the pension fund.

The union appealed, arguing that those benefits were part of the collective bargaining agreement in which salary had been sacrificed to pay for health insurance. But a federal appeals court upheld the bankruptcy court order, and on Tuesday the Supreme Court, without comment, declined to review it.

Trump may have some uncomfortable legal wrangling ahead in the Trump University fraud case, in which several key documents were unsealed Tuesday, and as Trump repeated his attacks on the federal judge presiding in the case.

However, the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in the Taj Mahal case on Tuesday provided a timely, if somewhat undramatic, reprieve.

The Taj Mahal remains open in Atlantic City, and is ranked #14 out of 52 hotels monitored by TripAdvisor in the seaside gambling resort town.

Atlantic City, which is still struggling to recover from the 2008 recession, was recently the subject of a gripping HBO gangster series, Boardwalk Empire, which touched on political themes in its early seasons.